The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of ...
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The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson—generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the “new” but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the ‘event.’Less

Against the Event : The Everyday and Evolution of Modernist Narrative

Michael Sayeau

Published in print: 2013-08-29

The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson—generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the “new” but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the ‘event.’

The book conceives the literary and cinematic category of “noir” as a way of understanding the defining conflict between authenticity and consumer culture in post–World War II America. It analyzes ...
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The book conceives the literary and cinematic category of “noir” as a way of understanding the defining conflict between authenticity and consumer culture in post–World War II America. It analyzes works of fiction and film in order to argue that both contribute to a “noir tradition” that is initiated around the end of World War II and continues to develop and evolve in the present. All of noir’s evolutions have taken place as responses to consumer culture; in the postwar era this consumer culture has become conflated with American citizenship, and the noir tradition presents itself as an “authentic” alternative to this republic of consumption. In order to see how noir and its descendants stage the confrontation between consumer culture and authenticity, my analysis is concentrated on how the texts that I write about represent various kinds of American commercial spaces. This analysis has a three-part structure, organized around the three key moments in the development of the noir tradition that I identify: (1) the postwar moment, as represented by classic film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction; (2) the sixties era, during which noir film and fiction are transformed and take the new form of the conspiracy narrative; and (3) the post-eighties period of dominant postmodernism, in which noir themes and aesthetics are revived, with a difference, to facilitate ways of responding to the phenomenon of global capitalism.Less

America Is Elsewhere : The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture

Erik Dussere

Published in print: 2013-09-01

The book conceives the literary and cinematic category of “noir” as a way of understanding the defining conflict between authenticity and consumer culture in post–World War II America. It analyzes works of fiction and film in order to argue that both contribute to a “noir tradition” that is initiated around the end of World War II and continues to develop and evolve in the present. All of noir’s evolutions have taken place as responses to consumer culture; in the postwar era this consumer culture has become conflated with American citizenship, and the noir tradition presents itself as an “authentic” alternative to this republic of consumption. In order to see how noir and its descendants stage the confrontation between consumer culture and authenticity, my analysis is concentrated on how the texts that I write about represent various kinds of American commercial spaces. This analysis has a three-part structure, organized around the three key moments in the development of the noir tradition that I identify: (1) the postwar moment, as represented by classic film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction; (2) the sixties era, during which noir film and fiction are transformed and take the new form of the conspiracy narrative; and (3) the post-eighties period of dominant postmodernism, in which noir themes and aesthetics are revived, with a difference, to facilitate ways of responding to the phenomenon of global capitalism.

Time matters to all of us. It dominates everyday discourse: diaries, schedules, clocks, working hours, opening times, appointments, weekdays and weekends, national holidays, religious festivals, ...
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Time matters to all of us. It dominates everyday discourse: diaries, schedules, clocks, working hours, opening times, appointments, weekdays and weekends, national holidays, religious festivals, birthdays, and anniversaries. But how do we, as unique individuals, subjectively experience time? The slowness of an hour in a boring talk, the swiftness of a summer holiday, the fleetingness of childhood, the endless wait for pivotal news: these are experiences to which we all can relate and of which we commonly speak. How can a writer not only report such experiences but also conjure them up in words so that readers share the frustration, the excitement, the anticipation, are on tenterhooks with a narrator or character, or in melancholic mourning for a time long since passed which we never experienced ourselves? This book suggests that the evocation of subjective temporal experience occurs in every sentence, on every page, at every plot turn, in any narrative. It offers a new template for understanding narrative time that combines close readings with analysis of the structural overview. It enables new ways of reading Thomas Mann, but also suggests new ways of conceptualizing narrative time in any literary work, not only in Mann’s fiction and not only in texts that foreground the narration of time. The range of Mann’s novels, novellas, and short stories is compared with other nineteenth- and twentieth-century works in German and in English to suggest a comprehensive approach to considering time in narrative.Less

The Architecture of Narrative Time : Thomas Mann and the Problems of Modern Narrative

Erica Wickerson

Published in print: 2017-06-08

Time matters to all of us. It dominates everyday discourse: diaries, schedules, clocks, working hours, opening times, appointments, weekdays and weekends, national holidays, religious festivals, birthdays, and anniversaries. But how do we, as unique individuals, subjectively experience time? The slowness of an hour in a boring talk, the swiftness of a summer holiday, the fleetingness of childhood, the endless wait for pivotal news: these are experiences to which we all can relate and of which we commonly speak. How can a writer not only report such experiences but also conjure them up in words so that readers share the frustration, the excitement, the anticipation, are on tenterhooks with a narrator or character, or in melancholic mourning for a time long since passed which we never experienced ourselves? This book suggests that the evocation of subjective temporal experience occurs in every sentence, on every page, at every plot turn, in any narrative. It offers a new template for understanding narrative time that combines close readings with analysis of the structural overview. It enables new ways of reading Thomas Mann, but also suggests new ways of conceptualizing narrative time in any literary work, not only in Mann’s fiction and not only in texts that foreground the narration of time. The range of Mann’s novels, novellas, and short stories is compared with other nineteenth- and twentieth-century works in German and in English to suggest a comprehensive approach to considering time in narrative.

This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often ...
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This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.Less

At the Violet Hour : Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland

Sarah Cole

Published in print: 2012-11-01

This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.

What happens when philosophy and literature meet? What is at stake when the text of a so-called single author begins to speak in two languages, now the language of theoretical reflexion, now the ...
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What happens when philosophy and literature meet? What is at stake when the text of a so-called single author begins to speak in two languages, now the language of theoretical reflexion, now the language of narrative fiction? And what relation does writing have to the limit that defines it, but, by exposing it to the limitlessness that lies beyond it, also threatens its possibility? These are some of the questions raised by three of the most provocative and influential French writers of the 20th century: Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), and Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Examining all three together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy whilst at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, and spectres that go under the name of literature. It considers in detail the philosophical and literary heritage shared by all three writers (Sade, Hegel, and Nietzsche), and analyses in turn both the philosophical writing and literary output of all three authors, paying particular attention to Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, Le Bleu du ciel, and Madame Edwarda; Klossowski's Les Lois de l'hospitalité, and Blanchot's Le Très-Haut and Le Dernier Homme.Less

Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot : Writing at the Limit

Leslie Hill

Published in print: 2001-06-14

What happens when philosophy and literature meet? What is at stake when the text of a so-called single author begins to speak in two languages, now the language of theoretical reflexion, now the language of narrative fiction? And what relation does writing have to the limit that defines it, but, by exposing it to the limitlessness that lies beyond it, also threatens its possibility? These are some of the questions raised by three of the most provocative and influential French writers of the 20th century: Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001), and Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Examining all three together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy whilst at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, and spectres that go under the name of literature. It considers in detail the philosophical and literary heritage shared by all three writers (Sade, Hegel, and Nietzsche), and analyses in turn both the philosophical writing and literary output of all three authors, paying particular attention to Bataille's Histoire de l'œil, Le Bleu du ciel, and Madame Edwarda; Klossowski's Les Lois de l'hospitalité, and Blanchot's Le Très-Haut and Le Dernier Homme.

Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature is the first monograph on sexuality in modern Tamil literature. The book offers an interpretation of shifting representations of masculine desire ...
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Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature is the first monograph on sexuality in modern Tamil literature. The book offers an interpretation of shifting representations of masculine desire in Tamil short stories and novels across the twentieth century. Through a reading of seven male writers many of whom drew inspiration from the Tamil writer K.P. Rajagopalan (1902–1944), there emerges a whole range of sensual intimacies between men and women that are irreducible to the sexual act. The book resists the equation of desire with sexual intercourse and explores the interpenetration of desire and other sensual modes of relating to the world that include spirituality, social reform, artistic creativity, and labour. Most of these narratives are focalized through men who are seemingly conflicted by their sexual desires and their attempts to preserve their religious or aesthetic integrity. There is no resolution to this conflict as these men try to offset the threat of (female) desire by idealizing women and reorienting their desires in other forms of sensual activity. The failure to either resist or entirely satisfy or sublimate desire compels the reconfiguration of meaning and subjectivity. While the first five writers of this book focus on the possibility of spiritualizing desire, the last two explore the reformative possibilities of asexual cross-gender partnerships and the transformative potential of labour that binds and reconfigures marginalized (lower-caste, working-class female) subjects.Less

Beyond Desire : Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature

Kiran Keshavamurthy

Published in print: 2016-10-06

Beyond Desire: Sexuality in Modern Tamil Literature is the first monograph on sexuality in modern Tamil literature. The book offers an interpretation of shifting representations of masculine desire in Tamil short stories and novels across the twentieth century. Through a reading of seven male writers many of whom drew inspiration from the Tamil writer K.P. Rajagopalan (1902–1944), there emerges a whole range of sensual intimacies between men and women that are irreducible to the sexual act. The book resists the equation of desire with sexual intercourse and explores the interpenetration of desire and other sensual modes of relating to the world that include spirituality, social reform, artistic creativity, and labour. Most of these narratives are focalized through men who are seemingly conflicted by their sexual desires and their attempts to preserve their religious or aesthetic integrity. There is no resolution to this conflict as these men try to offset the threat of (female) desire by idealizing women and reorienting their desires in other forms of sensual activity. The failure to either resist or entirely satisfy or sublimate desire compels the reconfiguration of meaning and subjectivity. While the first five writers of this book focus on the possibility of spiritualizing desire, the last two explore the reformative possibilities of asexual cross-gender partnerships and the transformative potential of labour that binds and reconfigures marginalized (lower-caste, working-class female) subjects.

In his 1934 book After Strange Gods, T. S. Eliot declared blasphemy “obsolescent” as a viable literary or artistic mode. There could be no blasphemy worth the name, he reasoned, in a world that had ...
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In his 1934 book After Strange Gods, T. S. Eliot declared blasphemy “obsolescent” as a viable literary or artistic mode. There could be no blasphemy worth the name, he reasoned, in a world that had lost its faith in God: a verdict that has gone curiously uncontested by literary scholarship. For while critics have long described modernism as “heretical” or “iconoclastic,” little attention has been paid to the profound ways in which modernism was shaped by blasphemy in the fully religious sense of that term. Far from obsolete, such blasphemy flourished in the writings of Eliot’s contemporaries and inheritors, recurring not only as theme and trope but as a signally modernist mode of writing. Profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their literary practice, writers such as Mina Loy, James Joyce, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes evolved richly embodied aesthetic practices that aspired to the condition of “words made flesh.” In doing so they belied Eliot’s premise of an inherently godless modernity, their poems and fictions revealing the extent to which religion endured as a cultural force in the twentieth century. More, these writers’ profanations spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas, including secular ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality.Less

Blasphemous Modernism : The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh

Steve Pinkerton

Published in print: 2017-02-17

In his 1934 book After Strange Gods, T. S. Eliot declared blasphemy “obsolescent” as a viable literary or artistic mode. There could be no blasphemy worth the name, he reasoned, in a world that had lost its faith in God: a verdict that has gone curiously uncontested by literary scholarship. For while critics have long described modernism as “heretical” or “iconoclastic,” little attention has been paid to the profound ways in which modernism was shaped by blasphemy in the fully religious sense of that term. Far from obsolete, such blasphemy flourished in the writings of Eliot’s contemporaries and inheritors, recurring not only as theme and trope but as a signally modernist mode of writing. Profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their literary practice, writers such as Mina Loy, James Joyce, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes evolved richly embodied aesthetic practices that aspired to the condition of “words made flesh.” In doing so they belied Eliot’s premise of an inherently godless modernity, their poems and fictions revealing the extent to which religion endured as a cultural force in the twentieth century. More, these writers’ profanations spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas, including secular ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality.

‘Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?’ asked the late Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance speech: ‘one does not have to choose the Holocaust as ...
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‘Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?’ asked the late Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance speech: ‘one does not have to choose the Holocaust as one’s subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades’. This book attends to this broken voice in literature in order to explore the meaning of the Holocaust in the contemporary world, arguing, again following Kertész, that the Holocaust will ‘remain through culture, which is really the vessel of memory’. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, it identifies and develops five concepts—the public secret, evil, stasis, disorientalism and kitsch—in a range of texts by significant writers (including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell, Imre Kertész, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad) as well as in work by victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust and of atrocities in Africa. In this way, the book explores the interweaving of complicity, responsibility, temporality, and the often problematic powers of narrative which make up some part of the legacy of the Holocaust.Less

The Broken Voice : Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

Robert Eaglestone

Published in print: 2017-06-08

‘Which writer today is not a writer of the Holocaust?’ asked the late Imre Kertész, Hungarian survivor and novelist, in his Nobel acceptance speech: ‘one does not have to choose the Holocaust as one’s subject to detect the broken voice that has dominated modern European art for decades’. This book attends to this broken voice in literature in order to explore the meaning of the Holocaust in the contemporary world, arguing, again following Kertész, that the Holocaust will ‘remain through culture, which is really the vessel of memory’. Drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, it identifies and develops five concepts—the public secret, evil, stasis, disorientalism and kitsch—in a range of texts by significant writers (including Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Littell, Imre Kertész, W. G. Sebald, and Joseph Conrad) as well as in work by victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust and of atrocities in Africa. In this way, the book explores the interweaving of complicity, responsibility, temporality, and the often problematic powers of narrative which make up some part of the legacy of the Holocaust.

For many decades, R.S. Thomas has been portrayed according to terms that he himself helped to define. Drawing on the poet’s status as a passionate defender of the Welsh nation, scholars have followed ...
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For many decades, R.S. Thomas has been portrayed according to terms that he himself helped to define. Drawing on the poet’s status as a passionate defender of the Welsh nation, scholars have followed his lead in emphasizing the Welsh credentials and dimensions of his work, tacitly affirming his chosen cultural identity. This book, however, through detailed consideration of Thomas’s writing, and extensive archival research into his reading and correspondence, goes against the grain of previous studies by revealing him as profoundly indebted to the English literary canon. Ultimately, Thomas emerges as a classic example of what Keats famously described as the ‘chameleon poet’, and through this prism the book illuminates the various dimensions of his relationship with the literary tradition, ranging from his early immersion in the work of the English Romantics, through to his discovery of Irish and Scottish writing, his response to key poetic figures, such as Herbert, Tennyson, Edward Thomas, and T.S. Eliot, his involvement with the influential journal Critical Quarterly, which inspired a creative dialogue with contemporaries like Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, and his late engagement with the traditions of the elegy as conceived within Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912–13. As well as suggesting new readings and associations, this groundbreaking exposition of R.S. Thomas’s work forms part of a wider investigation into the nature of the British poetic tradition and archipelagic identity, showing how Thomas’s Welshness was in fact a hybrid construct, emerging from his vigorous interaction with the literary cultures of England, Scotland, and Ireland as much as those of his homeland.Less

Chameleon Poet : R.S. Thomas and the Literary Tradition

S.J. Perry

Published in print: 2013-11-21

For many decades, R.S. Thomas has been portrayed according to terms that he himself helped to define. Drawing on the poet’s status as a passionate defender of the Welsh nation, scholars have followed his lead in emphasizing the Welsh credentials and dimensions of his work, tacitly affirming his chosen cultural identity. This book, however, through detailed consideration of Thomas’s writing, and extensive archival research into his reading and correspondence, goes against the grain of previous studies by revealing him as profoundly indebted to the English literary canon. Ultimately, Thomas emerges as a classic example of what Keats famously described as the ‘chameleon poet’, and through this prism the book illuminates the various dimensions of his relationship with the literary tradition, ranging from his early immersion in the work of the English Romantics, through to his discovery of Irish and Scottish writing, his response to key poetic figures, such as Herbert, Tennyson, Edward Thomas, and T.S. Eliot, his involvement with the influential journal Critical Quarterly, which inspired a creative dialogue with contemporaries like Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, and his late engagement with the traditions of the elegy as conceived within Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912–13. As well as suggesting new readings and associations, this groundbreaking exposition of R.S. Thomas’s work forms part of a wider investigation into the nature of the British poetic tradition and archipelagic identity, showing how Thomas’s Welshness was in fact a hybrid construct, emerging from his vigorous interaction with the literary cultures of England, Scotland, and Ireland as much as those of his homeland.

The child is a prominent figure in German literature and in German literary criticism alike. This book examines the ways in which German authors have used the child’s perspective to present the Third ...
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The child is a prominent figure in German literature and in German literary criticism alike. This book examines the ways in which German authors have used the child’s perspective to present the Third Reich. It examines a number of texts ranging from the 1930s to the 1980s. It also considers how children at this time were brought up and educated to accept unquestioningly National Socialist ideology, and thus questions the possibility of a traditional naive perspective on these events. Authors, as diverse as Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, and Christa Wolf, together with many less well-known writers had all used this perspective and this raises the question as to why it is such a popular means of confronting the enormity of the Third Reich. This study asks whether this perspective is an evasive strategy, a means of gaining new insights into the period, or a means of discovering a new language which had not been tainted by Nazism. This raises and addresses issues central to a post-war aesthetic in German writing.Less

The Child’s View of the Third Reich in German Literature : The Eye Among the Blind

Debbie Pinfold

Published in print: 2001-08-23

The child is a prominent figure in German literature and in German literary criticism alike. This book examines the ways in which German authors have used the child’s perspective to present the Third Reich. It examines a number of texts ranging from the 1930s to the 1980s. It also considers how children at this time were brought up and educated to accept unquestioningly National Socialist ideology, and thus questions the possibility of a traditional naive perspective on these events. Authors, as diverse as Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, and Christa Wolf, together with many less well-known writers had all used this perspective and this raises the question as to why it is such a popular means of confronting the enormity of the Third Reich. This study asks whether this perspective is an evasive strategy, a means of gaining new insights into the period, or a means of discovering a new language which had not been tainted by Nazism. This raises and addresses issues central to a post-war aesthetic in German writing.

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